Persuasion

Eight years ago Anne Elliot, then nineteen, was persuaded by an older friend to break off her engagement to a young naval officer without fortune, Frederick Wentworth. Now he returns from the wars a rich captain, while Anne, overlooked by her vain father and sisters, has lost her bloom. Thrown together again at Lyme and in Bath, the two must find out whether a love long buried can be spoken a second time.

Persuasion was the last novel Jane Austen completed, published after her death in 1817, and it is the most tender of her books. Karen Savage reads it alone, in about seven and a quarter hours.